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The Insecurity Industry

edwardsnowden.substack.com

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Re: The Insecurity Industry

#121

Post by denton-scratch »

vagrantJin wrote: post #104
dmoy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people I went to Uni with ended up in fields where the companies are liable for bad stuff, to a certain degree. It does exist. However: * you get paid a lot less * the companies and industries move very slowly * you spend a lot more time writing long-form, some time just re-using existing stuff wholesale, and almost no time building actually new things I mean like Real Engineering fields. What we do in so…

> I saw someone else talking about Rust, but I don't think that's what would happen in such a world. I agree. Let's not use tools as a crutch. Roman engineers built bridges that are still standing today with little to no maintenance. There's no indication that those structures are going to fail anytime soon either. I think we can agree that their tooling was worse than our current bridge building tools. > I mean like…

> Roman engineers built bridges that are still standing today

Roman engineers didn't understand the principles of civil engineering; I'm sure they built a lot of stuff that fell down (survivorship bias). So they started massively over-engineering their structures ("moar rocks!")

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#122

Post by yashap »

3pt14159 wrote: post #35

I'm not going to comment on Snowden's view of what liberal western states do when it comes to surveillance. I have my own opinion, but he's been right about stuff I'd disagreed with him in the past before so I'm gun shy about confronting his ideas again. On the topic of unsafe language though, he's absolutely right. We don't have to put up with this. We could pass a law and ban new code in unsafe languages from natio…

Would you refuse to use Postgres, the Linux kernel or SQLite because they’re all written in C?

Certainly C and C++ have more footguns than many other languages, but highly insecure as well as highly secure software gets written in all languages. I think coming up with better/easier avenues for digital-security-breach related lawsuits and fines is a better idea than banning specific languages.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#123

Post by nine_k »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #112
3pt14159 wrote: post #35

I'm not going to comment on Snowden's view of what liberal western states do when it comes to surveillance. I have my own opinion, but he's been right about stuff I'd disagreed with him in the past before so I'm gun shy about confronting his ideas again. On the topic of unsafe language though, he's absolutely right. We don't have to put up with this. We could pass a law and ban new code in unsafe languages from natio…

As a professional software engineer I'm not sure the idea of "safe" or "unsafe" programming languages is a coherent idea, or if it is then all languages are unsafe in my eyes. Yes C/C++ have more footguns than Java but there's no "hard line" in the safety differences and there are real and important things that need doing that it's not always clear can be reasonably done in another language. If you haven't, I'd encou…

Certainly there's no boundary that clearly delineates "safe" and "unsafe" languages.

But certain languages (like C and C++, for instance) have built-in footguns. They were built in for various important reasons, but right now many of these reasons are not as pressing anymore. We can take something like Ada, Rust, OCaml instead, or at least use the extensive tooling that allows to statically check programs written in (a rather wide subset of) C and detect great many classical pitfalls.

So I'd say that it's not about safe languages, but mostly about safe methods of development for critical software, methods that remove large classes of defects that are commonly exploitable.

This, of course, can be only one layer of protection; the OS and the hardware design should also do their part. Advanced devices, like desktop and phone CPUs, have some very good hardware features for protection, like MMUs, w^x bits for RAM pages, secure enclaves, etc. Simpler devices (like IoT SoCs) often don't, and they can be potentially cracked into more easily.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#124

Post by roca »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #112
3pt14159 wrote: post #35

I'm not going to comment on Snowden's view of what liberal western states do when it comes to surveillance. I have my own opinion, but he's been right about stuff I'd disagreed with him in the past before so I'm gun shy about confronting his ideas again. On the topic of unsafe language though, he's absolutely right. We don't have to put up with this. We could pass a law and ban new code in unsafe languages from natio…

As a professional software engineer I'm not sure the idea of "safe" or "unsafe" programming languages is a coherent idea, or if it is then all languages are unsafe in my eyes. Yes C/C++ have more footguns than Java but there's no "hard line" in the safety differences and there are real and important things that need doing that it's not always clear can be reasonably done in another language. If you haven't, I'd encou…

That paper has many problems. For example:

> There is no particular need to rewrite existing C code, provided the same benefit can be obtained more cheaply by alternative implementations of C

To be clear, those "alternative implementations" do not exist, and no-one actually working on C compilers or tools to make C code safer has been able to produce one, or even come up with a credible plan for producing one.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#125

Post by roca »

lu4p wrote: post #29
zozbot234 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is not safe for concurrent code, unfortunately. Specifically, it does not protect against data races on non-atomic types, which can lead to torn writes and break invariants that are required for safety.

True, but still memory safe, also Go has a race detector included which is really easy to use https://blog.golang.org/race-detector

No, Go is not memory safe for concurrent code.

Race detection is good but can't eliminate races altogether.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#126

Post by nine_k »

yashap wrote: post #122
3pt14159 wrote: post #35

I'm not going to comment on Snowden's view of what liberal western states do when it comes to surveillance. I have my own opinion, but he's been right about stuff I'd disagreed with him in the past before so I'm gun shy about confronting his ideas again. On the topic of unsafe language though, he's absolutely right. We don't have to put up with this. We could pass a law and ban new code in unsafe languages from natio…

Would you refuse to use Postgres, the Linux kernel or SQLite because they’re all written in C? Certainly C and C++ have more footguns than many other languages, but highly insecure as well as highly secure software gets written in all languages. I think coming up with better/easier avenues for digital-security-breach related lawsuits and fines is a better idea than banning specific languages.

Funny that you ask: Linux kernel rather actively embraces experimental code written in Rust.

And yes, for a really critical system I might consider taking something much simpler and potentially slower but formally proven correct, like seL4.

Google is working on Fuchsia as a new phone / chromebook OS, and it's very much focused on bulletproof security.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#127

Post by platinumrad »

3pt14159 wrote: post #35

I'm not going to comment on Snowden's view of what liberal western states do when it comes to surveillance. I have my own opinion, but he's been right about stuff I'd disagreed with him in the past before so I'm gun shy about confronting his ideas again. On the topic of unsafe language though, he's absolutely right. We don't have to put up with this. We could pass a law and ban new code in unsafe languages from natio…

You have an awfully rosy view of how regulation of programming languages would play out. What will happen (and this is already de facto the case in many "safety-critical" industries) is that Rust is banned and everyone is forced to write straightjacketed C89 and C++03. There's already a congressman on the record complaining about a "native Nigerian" committing code to Rust.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#128

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #35

I'm not going to comment on Snowden's view of what liberal western states do when it comes to surveillance. I have my own opinion, but he's been right about stuff I'd disagreed with him in the past before so I'm gun shy about confronting his ideas again. On the topic of unsafe language though, he's absolutely right. We don't have to put up with this. We could pass a law and ban new code in unsafe languages from natio…

Where is your legislation supposed to draw the line? In Rust you need to have occasional unsafe code - you can't even have a double linked list or bidirectional graph without unsafe code. Would you also outlaw jni calls in java?

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#129

Post by platinumrad »

dylan604 wrote: post #117
mikepurvis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other industries handle this kind of thing with a layer of indirection: instead of laws from the state, the state imbues a professional body with certification power, and the body sets standards by consensus or whatever other process among their members. So if you're an architect, or lawyer, or tradesperson, or whatever, you have to do things in the manner prescribed or you lose your license. I know this kind of thin…

Anytime gov't gets involved though, you have to consider how the lobbiest will get involved. So a proponent with deep pockets that is thouroghly entreched with a language about to be "banned" decides to hire a lobbiest to convince these "well educated in all things" gov't reps. Yet proponents of "safe" languages have no cash to spend. Which language is going to get banned then?

Green Hills with its decades of DoD contracts versus the left wing browser company. Gee I wonder who would win?

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#130

Post by rapjr9 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #35

I'm not going to comment on Snowden's view of what liberal western states do when it comes to surveillance. I have my own opinion, but he's been right about stuff I'd disagreed with him in the past before so I'm gun shy about confronting his ideas again. On the topic of unsafe language though, he's absolutely right. We don't have to put up with this. We could pass a law and ban new code in unsafe languages from natio…

C and C++ are really versatile, why are there no safe libraries for them (or are there?). If you want to make buffer overflows impossible then add a library that does so and use it. If you want safer memory handling use a library. Or extend C and C++ with standard libraries that are safer to use. Java is implemented in C so anything Java can do, C can do. Many languages are actually implemented in C.

What is this fascination with creating a new language every time we want to add some features? Is it the fame of creating and naming your own computer language? From a security perspective creating a new language reduces security because it will never have been as thoroughly vetted as the old languages.

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